Gregor von Rezzori: An Ermine in Czernopol

I’m certain that Herr Tarangolian wasn’t thinking about himself when he said that, although he was far too profound not to realize — and let show — how much actually applied to him and how much didn’t. In any case, it was entirely in his nature to hand us the key to restricted areas he may not have intended to enter himself. And never was he more dangerous. He left it entirely up to us to decide which was Bluebeard’s secret chamber. And so, when all was said and done, the contradictions inherent in his character were impossible to interpret. For just as his mincingly affected manners and general foppishness suited neither his intelligence nor the gravity of his position as statesman — far more significant posts than the prefecture of Tescovina would later be entrusted to him — at the same time they could not be separated from his peculiar personality, so his empathy, his capacity for sincere friendship, or even affectionate devotion, moving as it often was, came coupled with an extreme unreliability. Behind his permanently unclouded kindness he could be dangerously moody, and everyone who had good reason to consider himself a close confidant of the prefect learned sooner or later that Herr Tarangolian had made a scathing remark about him behind his back.

I will no doubt sound naïve if I say that his unreliable traits never showed in the summer. In reality they were just as visible then as at any other time, but their relationship to his other traits was different — the distribution of weight, if that’s what it might be called, was different. The change showed chiefly in his dress; after all, it’s an irrefutable fact that despite the equalizing effects of convention, our clothes remain a very telltale expression of character and even affect the wearer, so that, for instance, someone who fancies a tweedy suit of gray, yellow, and blotting-paper-pink, cut in the English style, instinctively imagining himself as one of the aloof sons of Albion touring the Continent, is bound to feel some of their stiff upper lip and dispassionate interest, while the same person wearing krakowiak boots and a corded tunic would unquestionably show a fiery disposition.

Herr Tarangolian’s own summer dress was distinctly Mediterranean. His cream-colored suit of raw silk, and particularly his broad raffia-like woven belt with the sewn leather pockets, connected by a threadlike golden watch chain with a double drape, gave him a casual, holiday air that called to mind Adriatic promenades and siestas on hotel terraces in the shade of dusty agaves: a restrained exoticism that tempts one to accept certain things and even reinterpret them. Accordingly, his gallant clichés and charming nonsense seemed, if not natural, then at least in the right place — something like the tinselly polish of a former dragoman of the Sublime Porte enjoying the permanent holiday of the retired Levantine civil servant, a man of some means sitting in front of a street café, staring at the women with the jaundiced, heavy eyes of the liver-diseased, rolling cigarettes with delicious-smelling tobacco drawn from a silver niello case, sporting a freshly bedewed rose boutonnière to match his panama hat and his ebony cane with the ivory handle.

In winter, on the other hand, Herr Tarangolian looked like a colossal, menacing elemental force. Only then did you notice the rough cut of his face, with its strong cheekbones that seemed lifted by the enormous bear collar of his sledding fur, glowing in the cold like a hot samovar. In this season his protruding stomach, which the summer belt had gently and healthfully kept in check, nearly burst his heavy coat, turning it into an unmanageable hide, thick and prickly, while his white shirt, very spruce and stylish, with stiff collar and starched cuffs, and his glistening shoes with bright felt spats flashed deceivingly from underneath, with the waxy perfection of a horse chestnut glistening through a cracked shell — a tree, by the way, that thrived in our part of the world, and which has remained my favorite, perhaps because the prickly balls encapsulate what always struck our childlike imagination as autumn’s most compressed form, like a pearl; or perhaps because the drumbeat of their falling announces a yearly parting that leaves more behind than merely another summer; or else perhaps because there was something exceedingly human in this downpour of fruit, in the sheer extravagance of flinging these beautiful things to the mercy of a frosty wasteland. I can’t really say why, but then you don’t always have to be able to say why it is you love.

Along with his sledding fur, Herr Tarangolian wore a creased, melon-shaped cap with ear flaps that were pulled halfway up and stood out like a pair of wings. There was something architectural about it — an odd mixture of cupola and pagoda that called to mind the baked-mud palaces of Samarkand, and Mongols in quilted robes hunched against the icy wind, driving their yaks and camels across the high plains, only instead of a face smooth as soapstone and old as the grave mounds of Tibet, the prefect’s martial mustache and devilishly black eyebrows gazed upon us in strict and terrible judgment.

The prettily spotted Dalmatians stayed at home; Herr Tarangolian arrived in a sled. Wrapped in his driving fur, the coachman sat enthroned on the box, massive and shaggy, towering overhead like a mammoth. The pitiful batman, by contrast, was blue with cold in his pathetically thin uniform coat. He kept his arms crossed over his chest and his hands buried inside his cuffs, with his shoulders tensed in a high shrug and a scarf wound tightly around his chin and ears. Like some primeval bird, he peeked forlornly out from under his turned-up collar; the brass buttons of his coat had frosted over and had lost their gleam. The humble gratitude with which he accepted a glass of brandy was moving; he seemed not to have had a decent bite to eat for weeks. Whenever we heard about the suffering of the emperor’s great army, which had gone down in the ice of the steppes — about the glorious regiments scattered as food for the ravens, while a small train of the defeated trudged off to distant forests, doubled over against the wind — we always called to mind the prefect’s batman, who even in summer brought us a whiff of martial excitement, with his gleaming spiked helmet. And in that way the tragedy of that campaign always struck us as the victory of gray-white colorlessness over the jubilation of color whose symbols, the flags with their soaring eagles, were left behind, buried in snow and bleached by the icy winds.

Herr Tarangolian appeared even more massive than his enormous coachman within a veritable bear’s den of furs, foot-muffs, and blankets, which the batman hastily tried to peel off. But the prefect made little headway, since his fingers were so stiff from the cold, and in his frustration he fell into a desperate rage and set upon the furs as if he were attempting to flay the skin off a dead animal. Once he was halfway free, Herr Tarangolian strained to pull himself up and, giving an ice age — like groan of satisfaction at the frosty landscape, set his richly ringed hand on the man’s shoulder for support and stepped off the sled, his enormous weight appearing to press the man deep into the snow. We watched this scene through little peepholes we had revealed with our warm breath in the window of our children’s room; the pane was feathered over with frosty patterns, so that the entire event seemed to take place in a wondrous forest of glittering palm fronds and acanthus thickets, ornamented like the tendrils of an illuminated manuscript, where reality was raised to the realm of fable, and everything seemed sharper, brighter, and more intense: A powerful and mighty man leaning on his beggarly servant … As far as we were concerned, the sheer fact that this servant was a soldier had a ring of biblical righteousness, and that canceled the sacrilege he had committed in our eyes by wrapping a tattered woman’s shawl around his face and chin, as if he had a toothache. What we saw taught us how merciless and unfair the world could be, though none of us could have explained exactly how or in what way. As a result, our eager anticipation of the prefect’s arrival was tempered with a certain apprehension, however captivating we found the man himself.